Johannesburg Cityscape at Night - Larry Scully (1922 - 2002)

South African artist and art educator. He was the first in South Africa to receive a Masters in Fine Art. Going on to teach at Polly Street and WITS before becoming Professor of Fine Art at Stellenbosch University. This work is from arguably his most successful time as a painter, 1969. Esme Burman writes: "…he moved to Johannesburg and new environmental forces came to bear on his expression. The College of Education stood on the northern brow and looked down upon the city. From the relative quiet of a Pretoria suburb he was plunged into daily contact with the hub-bub of Hillbrow and the frenzied animation of a developing metropolis. Into the calm breadth of his painted vistas was injected a pulsating rhythm - the percussive syncopation of the city. He was fascinated particularly by the ambiguous night-image of sparkling lights and shadowed finite forms of buildings reaching into the infinite darkness of the starlit sky." "Black, which had practically receded from his palette during the cool-blue phase of marine themes, returned to his canvases in broad, emphatic zones, to create walls of darkness pierced by windows of colour through which fragmented abstract vistas glow. In seeking to interpret the confining framework of the 'concrete jungle', Scully continued to project his vision of the endless light and space of Africa beyond. His expression of that vision reached a climax in the commission for the vestibule of the Hillbrow apartment building, Dudley Heights. The painted panels, framed by mural cladding of pale stone, presented a summary in forceful abstract form and colour of various aspects of his African experience: the drama of the city, the symbolic presence of tribal ritual, the glitter of electric light, the glow of the sun and moon, the spacious sky - blue by day, black by night."

Date Published: 1969
Publication Place: Johannesburg